Red zoning and red listing

Agricultural diversity is at risk of loss, even though all genetic resources could not be collected for long term conservation within a short period of time. Therefore, red zoning and red listing are very useful for prioritizing conservation and utilization efforts as well as for initiating in-situ, on-farm and ex-situ conservation appropriately. Red listing is more common in wild fauna and flora. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of wild
flora and fauna (CITES) have developed their own criteria for wild fauna and flora for red listing since 1965. Red list categories for agricultural plant genetic resources (APGRs) have been started since 1998 in Nepal (Joshi et al 2004, Sthapit et al 2005, Joshi and Gauchan 2017).

Red zone is any areas where agricultural land is going turned to other uses, and native genetic resources are at risk of loss because of modern varieties, development works, natural disasters, etc. Red zoning is the process of identifying red zone in agricultural land.

Collection gap is the areas from where any genetic resources have not been collected before or if collected, in very few numbers. Red list (also termed conservation status) is the list of crop species, and cultivars (varieties or landraces), prepared from the conservation aspects and considered trend of genetic erosion. The process of listing under red list categories is called red listing. It also includes rare and unique cultivars which are based upon the geographic range, habitat specificity, trait specificity and local population size.

For example decreasing population size over the time of any landrace indicates that this landrace is at endangered state and it may extinct soon. This is important to determine the red zone, collection gap and red list status of crop landraces for setting priority attention for conservation as well as planning different types of actions for groups of landraces (Joshi and Gauchan 2017).

Joshi, B.K.; Ghimire, K.H.; Bhandari, B.; Gauchan, D.; Gurung, R.; Pudasaini, N. (2020) Red zoning and red listing. In: Joshi, B.K.; Gauchan, D.; Bhandari, B.; Jarvis, D.